National security bidding war and the quest for votes

The polls might show that voters will cheer on whoever promises most explicitly to hurt refugees - like yesterday's promise from the Coalition to "stop the boats" within a first term. But it doesn't have to be like this, writes Jeff Sparrow.

"Unless you take this head on, we are dead in western Sydney."

Laurie Ferguson's message to Julia Gillard about refugee policy perfectly epitomises the weird political projection that takes place when Australian politicians discuss asylum seekers.

In Ferguson's trope, it's Labor MPs who are suffering - dying, no less! - and it's refugees who are persecuting them.

That's a perspective that would come as a shock to, say, the Tamil asylum seekers in Australia, men and women who, if not granted shelter, face return to one of the most repressive states in the world, a nation where those of the wrong ethnicity risk a death decidedly non-metaphorical.

There's no serious dispute about Sri Lanka's descent into violent authoritarianism, a subject documented, most recently in an April 30 Amnesty report entitled 'Assault on Dissent'.

Yet Foreign Minister Bob Carr, presumably motivated by Labor's desire to rid itself of as many claimants as possible, continues to insist that Tamils do not live in fear, an assertion supported by almost no-one else, apart from the regime and its mouthpieces.

Noam Chomsky writes somewhere of the ideological inversion that comes with oppression, where those in positions of power invariably see themselves as victims, bravely defending themselves against existential threats. There's more than a whiff of that in how the refugee debate plays out.

Ferguson's sense of the asylum issue presumably comes after consultation with Labor's polling wizards. Yet on this topic, in particular, it's worth recalling Pierre Bourdieu's famous caution that public opinion should be understood as "artifact, pure and simple, the function of which is to dissemble that the state of opinion at any given moment is a system of forces and tensions and that nothing is more inadequate for representing the state of opinion than a percentage".

To put it another way, so much depends on how exactly the question gets put.

If you wandered about western Sydney asking whether or not Australia should secure its borders, an overwhelming series of affirmatives would come as no great surprise. You might equally ask punters whether they love their mothers or if they're for or against puppy dogs: after all, no-one will put their hand up to demand greater 'insecurity'.

If, however, the survey asked respondents directly about whether they would intervene to help an innocent man tortured by a dictator, the results might well be different.

That's not to dismiss anti-refugee sentiment as a sleight of hand produced by unscrupulous pollsters. But it does suggest that the debate depends a great deal on how politicians pose the question.

As soon as you frame the discussion of involuntary migration as a crisis experienced by the wealthy world, so that claims for asylum become a hostile act and refugees (by their very nature) represent a problem, you've already ceded the debate to the conservatives.

Thus the tougher Labor talks on border protection, the more it reinforces the sense of an overwhelming threat against which the citizenry has a perfect right to demand protection.

It's a recipe for an open-ended national security bidding war, an auction conducted on terms that perfectly suit the Right.

Every time it employs such rhetoric, Labor moves further into John Howard's territory, raising the obvious question as to why voters would opt for an imitation when, with Tony Abbott, they can have something very close to the original.

In any case, what exactly else does Ferguson think Labor might do to further demonstrate its hostility to those fleeing persecution?

Already, the Gillard Government holds families in permanent detention without trial on the basis of security assessments they can't even access. It has decreed that asylum seekers in the community can neither work nor collect normal social security, thus condemning them to utter penury; it has excised the entire continent from the migration zone, a plan previously too extreme for Howard to get past the Liberal Party.

Of course, the Coalition's Scott Morrison regularly promises ever more byzantine cruelties to be inflicted on refugees. They will be forced to work, he says - but they won't be paid the normal rate.

Local residents and the police will be compulsorily informed every time an asylum seeker moves into a neighbourhood. And so on and on and on, in an ever more hallucinatory succession of petty torments and indignities, heaped on some of the most vulnerable people in the country.

What would happen if Labor set out to trump every one of Morrison's elaborate sadisms?

If Morrison brings to his portfolio the enthusiasm of a small boy torturing flies, his inventiveness only invigorates the Liberal cadre, many of whom more or less openly see refugees as the enemy. But when the ALP lurches down the same path, it deadens a little part of the soul of its activists.

Even today, people do not join the Labor Party to preside over hunger strikes or construct grim detention centres from which journalists and human rights activists are barred or force traumatised survivors to depend on charity in permanent destitution.

Labor's apparatchiks might conclude that the party can afford to lose the inner suburbs. But poll numbers alone don't capture what happens if the ALP alienates whatever remains of its true believers, the men and women who still attend branch meetings, who turn up to distribute how-to-vote cards, who make the case for Labor in their workplaces and neighbourhoods.

You could feel this layer come alive when Gillard attacked Abbott on misogyny; you will also feel them wilt and shrivel if the ALP fights this election on monstering asylum seekers.

It doesn't have to be like this.

The polls might today show that voters will cheer on whoever promises most explicitly to hurt refugees.

But public sentiment can change. The best proof of that, of course, comes from a comparison of the relative ease with which much larger numbers of asylum seekers were accepted in the '70s, next to the utter hysteria that accompanies relatively small numbers today.

Today's attitudes are not innate but rather were created by a series of political decisions, not least by the bipartisan embrace of the war on terror.

Ironically, the dire situation facing the ALP today actually creates an opportunity to reset the debate. Labor's going to lose anyway, so why not break from the punitive approach to refugees?

Rather than hiding asylum seekers from journalists and the public, what about allowing them to tell their stories, on the basis that, when ordinary Australians hear what such people have gone through, they're far more likely to empathise than when they just see faces behind razor wire.

After all, there's losing and then there's losing.

If the ALP goes to the polls on anti-refugee platform, it will do more than tarnish the already pretty tawdry legacy the Gillard administration leaves behind. It will also render the process of rebuilding after the election more difficult and more traumatic, as Labor in opposition struggles to articulate what differentiates it from an Abbott administration.

The ALP's gradual embrace of refugee policies that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier recalls the famous passage from Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead:

There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said - no. But, somehow we missed it.

Well, we'll know better next time.

Jeff Sparrow is the editor of Overland literary journal and the author of Killing: Misadventures in Violence. View his full profile here.